Get More Smarter on Thursday (Sept. 16)

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  by: Colorado Pols September 16, 2021 at 9:51 AM MDT

Happy Mexican Independence Day. Please celebrate responsibly. Let’s Get More Smarter. If you think we missed something important, please include the link in the comments below (here’s a good example). If you are more of an audio learner, check out The Get More Smarter Podcast. And don’t forget to find us on Facebook and Twitter. 

 

CORONAVIRUS INFO…

*Colorado Coronavirus info:
CDPHE Coronavirus website 

*Daily Coronavirus numbers in Colorado:
 http://covid19.colorado.gov

*How you can help in Colorado:
COVRN.com

*Locate a COVID-19 testing site in Colorado:
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment 

 

► As The Colorado Sun reports, there’s a new proposed congressional redistricting map out for discussion:

The latest draft of Colorado’s congressional map avoids putting the state’s current U.S. House members into the same district, while creating a sweeping district across most of the Western Slope and southern Colorado. The new 8th Congressional District in the north Denver metro region would be nearly 39% Hispanic.

The new map released Wednesday groups most of the Western Slope and southern Colorado into a single, L-shaped 3rd Congressional District. Northwest high-country counties including Routt, Jackson, Eagle, Summit and Grand are grouped with Larimer and Boulder into a proposed 2nd Congressional District. And the new districts would no longer pit Garfield County Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert against Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse of Lafayette.

And the proposed 7th District, now centered in the north and west metro area, would include much of Jefferson County but stretch to South Park in the central Rocky Mountains.

This new map is not without problems, as The Sun notes:

Morgan Carroll, chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, disputed the congressional commission’s formula for determining the political competitiveness of a district.

“Measuring competitiveness by focusing on strong years for one party and ignoring 2014 — which was a strong year for the other party — is simply wrong,” Carroll said in a statement. “As a result, this could very likely end up a 4-4 map after the midterms, which is in no way reflective of Colorado voters.”

The Independent Congressional Redistricting Commission will debate this new map tonight. If at least eight votes can’t be garnered, the nonpartisan staff will produce a third proposed map on Sept. 23. CLICK HERE to see Congressional Map #2.

In other redistricting news, the Colorado Secretary of State’s office is investigating potential illegal lobbying activity committed by a handful of well-known Republican operatives. The Colorado Times Recorder also has the full video of a ham-handed presentation that Republican Rep. Matt Soper gave to several Republicans in July.

 

► Republican Heidi Ganahl announced her campaign for Governor on Tuesday and is off to the worst start for a statewide candidate in recent memory.

Former State Republican Party Chairman Dick Wadhams has some biting criticism that applies to Ganahl, as The Colorado Times Recorder reports:

A day after Heidi Ganahl, the newly minted GOP gubernatorial candidate, refused to tell reporters whether she thought the last year’s presidential election was legitimate, Wadhams said Republicans won’t be “credible in a general election” unless they say the election was not stolen.

“I think candidates ought to look at the reporter and say, ‘I do not believe the election was stolen. I do not believe we should ban 1.6 million unaffiliated voters from voting in the primary.’ And I think we just ought to take a stand on this because it’s defining our party,” Wadhams told Peter Boyles.

“I honestly think we’ve got to have strong candidates who were willing to say, no, the election was not stolen because that’s the only way they can be credible in a general election.”

You know Republicans are worried about Ganahl’s campaign when they immediately start blaming the media for her troubles.

 

► The Denver Post reports on a significant new finding from the Colorado Attorney General’s office:

Colorado’s attorney general will require the Aurora Police Department to make sweeping reforms after a year-long investigation found officers’ pattern of racially biased policing and use of excessive force routinely violated state and federal law.

The department’s officers persistently arrested and injured Black individuals and other people of color at higher rates than white residents, according to the investigation released Wednesday.

Officers also routinely used excessive force against people unnecessarily, failed to de-escalate encounters and failed to properly document information about individuals they stopped as required by state law, the investigation found.

The department’s training and accountability structures are inadequate and create a culture of violence, according to investigators’ 112-page report.

Anyone who has been paying any attention to Aurora in the last couple of years will not likely be surprised by this report. Attorney General Phil Weiser wants to create a consent decree to allow his office to work with the Aurora PD on making widespread reforms.

 

► As Denver7 reports, ICU capacity in Colorado hospitals has reached its lowest levels of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Click below to keep learning stuff…

 

(more…)

VIDEO: ‘Redistricting 2021’ Presentation by Colorado State Rep Matt Soper

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  by: Erik Maulbetsch September 16, 2021 at 9:42 AM MDT

(The quiet part, except out loud – Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Last month, Colorado Politics’ Evan Wyloge broke the story of Rep. Matt Soper’s redistricting presentation, in which the legislator provided local Republican party officers and activists with alternate maps and testimony intended to keep him and at least one of his Western Slope colleagues in their current districts. Wyloge’s story and subsequent reporting covered Soper’s request to his audience that they never mention that he was the one providing their talking points, as well as his frustration with the consultants running the Colorado Neighborhood Coalition, the conservative lobbying group that he said was hired by the Colorado House & Senate Republicans. CNC lobbyist Alan Philp denied that claim and Soper retracted that statement, saying he was mistaken.

The Colorado Times Recorder has obtained video of Soper’s nearly hour-long July 18 presentation. It’s split into three videos. (Part 1, is here, Part 2 & Part 3 are embedded below within the full transcript.)

Hosted by longtime Aspen conservative activist Maurice Emmer, the virtual meeting also included Mesa County GOP Chair Kevin McCarney, Pitkin County GOP Vice Chair Frieda Wallison, and election fraud conspiracist Sherronna Bishop, who formerly served as Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s campaign manager.

Two previously unreported sections are noteworthy, including Soper’s comments about specific commission members and his belief that the preliminary legislative map drawn by the commission’s nonpartisan staff was “gerrymandered” to favor Democrats.

Soper expressed concerns with four members of the state legislative commission: two Democrats from Steamboat and Aspen, and two recent CU Boulder graduates, one Republican and one Unaffiliated, whom he describes as “relatively new to the state.”

“What really concerns me is the two members on the legislative redistricting commission,” said Soper. “One is from Steamboat Springs, one is from Aspen; both are the two Democrats or I should say, two of the Democrats on the committee. We also have two recent graduates from CU Boulder who came out of different states. They’re relatively new to the state. One is a Republican, one is unaffiliated. This is also a bit concerning to me because they don’t necessarily know the history of the state or the geography or the culture. I’m going to emphasize geography and culture quite a bit in this presentation because the commission does not want to hear about we’ve we’ve always done it this way, so therefore we should continue to do it this way. I find that a persuasive argument that’s probably from being a lawyer in my background before I became a legislator.”

Robin Schepper of Steamboat and Blanca Uzeta O’Leary of Aspen are the first two members Soper flagged as problematic. His concerns are presumably based upon the fact that both members from CD3 are ski town Democrats. The Commission’s make-up was determined by a complex set of rules prioritizing geographic, congressional district, and partisan considerations following a lottery from a pool of self-selected applicants- i.e. people had to sign up in the first place.

(more…)

Wadhams Wouldn’t Be ‘Surprised’ if Majority of CO GOP Governing Body Votes To Exit Open Primaries

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  by: Michael Lund September 16, 2021 at 6:53 AM MDT

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Former Colorado Republican leader Dick Wadhams “would not be surprised” if over 50% of the governing body of the Colorado Republican Party votes Saturday not to participate in open primaries anymore, falling short of the 75% that’s legally required to dump open primaries but setting the table for GOP activists to file a lawsuit that could overturn the 75% threshold and allow Republicans to eschew primaries as early as next year.

Wadhams made the comments on KHOW’s Peter Boyles show this morning in an interview in which he also cast a decidedly sour view on GOP candidates who baselessly say the last presidential election was fraudulent.

“I would not be surprised if they get over 50% of the people who show up that day,” said Wadhams on air. “And frankly, that is concerning enough to me that our state central committee, the most active Republicans around the state, might vote to support this crazy idea to eliminate the primary.

“It will not get 75%,” said Wadhams. “It will fail. But what I would wish happen, is like it would be defeated soundly. I don’t think that’ll be the case, to be honest, Peter. I think it’s past.”

A day after Heidi Ganahl, the newly minted GOP gubernatorial candidate, refused to tell reporters whether she thought the last year’s presidential election was legitimate, Wadhams said Republicans won’t be “credible in a general election” unless they say the election was not stolen.

“I think candidates ought to look at the reporter and say, ‘I do not believe the election was stolen. I do not believe we should ban 1.6 million unaffiliated voters from voting in the primary.’ And I think we just ought to take a stand on this because it’s defining our party,” Wadhams told Boyles.

“I honestly think we’ve got to have strong candidates who were willing to say, no, the election was not stolen because that’s the only way they can be credible in a general election.”

Last week, A Republican lawyer joined an ACLU of Colorado attorney in saying Republicans have a case in court to argue that the 75% threshold should be tossed out and replaced by a simple majority.

They’d have an even better argument if the party votes by over 50% to exit the primaries, say GOP activists.

The percentage required is not just based on the Republicans who show up Saturday but on the total membership of the GOP governing body, including those who aren’t present Saturday. There are different opinions on whether proxy votes will be allowed.

Thursday Open Thread

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  by: Colorado Pols September 16, 2021 at 6:50 AM MDT

“The civility which money will purchase is rarely extended to those who have none.”

–Charles Dickens

Heidi Ganahl’s Gubernatorial Campaign Sputters to Life

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  by: Colorado Pols September 15, 2021 at 3:38 PM MDT

UPDATE: Day 2 is not looking much better than Day 1.

—–

Heidi Ganahl during her disastrous interview with 9News on the day of her campaign launch.

Republican Heidi Ganahl finally announced on Tuesday that she is running for Governor in 2022. It may not have been the worst kickoff for a statewide campaign in Colorado history, but only because there really aren’t good records for that sort of thing. We can definitively say, however, that Ganahl’s campaign launch was the worst we’ve seen in Colorado this century.

It was that bad.

Colorado has seen a few rocky campaign starts in recent memory, including Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Cary Kennedy’s cringeworthy Facebook Live moment in 2017 that featured the candidate driving around her neighborhood before pulling into her driveway for the big reveal. But whereas Kennedy’s official announcement was a creative idea that just didn’t work, Ganahl’s launch was a daylong massacre punctuated by one of the worst sit-down interviews we can recall from a Colorado politician.

Ganahl stumbled last week in teasing her campaign launch, first telling reporters that there would be some sort of announcement followed a day later by her campaign inexplicably filing the paperwork to make her candidacy official — thus ruining any last bit of suspense. Her first campaign event on Tuesday was held at Rosie’s Diner in Monument (at 8:00 in the morning), which is an auspicious location that still carries bad juju from former Sen. Cory Gardner’s much-maligned 2020 TV advertisement.

Soon afterward, Ganahl faceplanted in front of a handful of reporters by refusing to answer questions that any rookie campaign staffer should have easily anticipated. It was a foreboding start to a rough day for Ganahl.

“I’ll try and win no matter what the path forward is. Whatever my party decides is the path forward…We’ve got a long road ahead.”

     — Heidi Ganahl’s inspiring words Tuesday, as quoted by The Colorado Sun

After leaving Monument, Ganahl’s campaign continued on a Front Range tour that somebody apparently forgot to prep outside of these weird “Meat Heidi” signs. From what we hear, Ganahl made a stop at a Camp Bow Wow location in Centennial that was attended by plenty of dogs but no human beings. This is particularly strange when you consider that Ganahl lives in nearby Lone Tree; you’d think her campaign could have wrangled a few neighbors to show up in Centennial.

Things already weren’t going well for Ganahl by the time she rolled into Westminster and sat down for a completely disastrous interview with Marshall Zelinger of 9News. You really need to watch the entire four minute conversation to truly appreciate just how terrible this was for Ganahl, but here are some of the lowlights:

♦ Ganahl was asked about the fact that she deleted a big chunk of her social media history just last week. She responded by saying that it is her “policy as a businessperson” to nuke her social media posts once every six months or so (yeah, right). When Zelinger asked why, she replied, “I don’t think that’s important.” D’oh!

 

♦ Zelinger then asked Ganahl the same question she had botched earlier with reporters from The Denver Post and elsewhere: Do you think there was fraud in the 2020 election?

Ganahl’s response: “Why all the divisive questions?”

When Zelinger pushed her for an answer on what is — again — a very obvious question, Ganahl barfed this out: “Oh my goodness, Marshall. Let’s talk about what’s important to the people of Colorado. And that’s kids, it’s skyrocketing crime. I just said that kids are killing themselves at record rates and we want to talk about other things that aren’t that important to many people.”

Seriously, that was her answer. Word for word.

 

♦ Later, Ganahl was tossed a softball about incumbent Gov. Jared Polis, which she used as an opening to complain about how Colorado handled contact tracing in late 2020 that coincided with an increase in deaths at nursing homes. Zelinger followed up Ganahl via email to ask what she would have done differently had she been in charge, and she responded, “Everything.” Ganahl had time to think about this answer, and she still only came up with “Everything.”

 

An optimist would say that everything will be downhill from here — that Ganahl can’t possibly be any worse than she was on Tuesday. A realist would note that Ganahl has been prepping a run for governor for at least a year now; if this is what happens when Ganahl and her campaign have time to prepare, we can only imagine how rough things will get when Team Ganahl has to think on its feet.

As we’ve seen from polling data, Ganahl wasn’t likely to beat Polis next year no matter how her campaign got off the ground, but nothing that starts this poorly is likely to end well.

California Experts Debunk Local “Hickerbilly” Conspiracy Theories

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  by: Colorado Pols September 15, 2021 at 2:49 PM MDT

Heidi Ganahl and Mesa County Clerk and Recorder (and fugitive) Tina Peters

With the California gubernatorial recall election having ended in a blowout well beyond any reasonable disputation, we took note of this report in the San Francisco Examiner yesterday about how the recent election system security breach in Mesa County, Colorado was impacting the use of Dominion Voting Systems elections hardware in the California special election.

It’s a tale that has a little bit of everything. But the twists and turns do not include a real threat to the security of the Gavin Newsom recall vote, experts say. Despite the bizarre episode, city and state voting is secure, they insist.

It all started in May, when a county clerk in Colorado named Tina Peters assisted in the theft of voting machine software and other information, Colorado state officials say. The voting machine software and other Dominion voting machine details were posted online and shared elsewhere by hackers and far-right conspiracy theorists. State and federal law enforcement launched investigations, but Peters disappeared. My Pillow founder and staunch Trump ally Mike Lindell said he was hiding the missing Peters. Newsom challenger Larry Elder, meanwhile, has promoted election fraud claims, including Dominion theories…

Rep. Lauren Boebert with 2020 primary campaign manager Sherronna Bishop.

To be clear, actual elections experts with actual qualifications in California are looking at the situation now, not the pack of self-described “hickerbillies” who tried and failed to convince Mesa County’s all-Republican Board of Commissioners that something nefarious was to be found in the data pilfered from the Mesa County Clerk’s office. The fact is, now that we’ve seen what was stolen and the lack of proof sought by the thieves of a larger conspiracy that might somehow justify their criminal actions, only one real threat has emerged from the whole controversy:

Eight cybersecurity experts say there is now a legitimate risk to election security – because of the software and other Dominion details leaked by the conspiracy theorists. The conspiracy theorists made their own Dominion claims credible by stealing and circulating sensitive security details about the machines, they believe…

“Release of the code is sufficient to demand emergency action,” David Jefferson, a signer of the letter and retired computer scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory told The Examiner. “We don’t know of any threat to this election, however.” [Pols emphasis]

“The release of the code was apparently politically motivated, and it is not a minor thing,” statistics professor and election security expert Philip Stark, of UC Berkeley, told The Examiner. “They pointed out a security issue – and they are part of it.”

It was clear early on in the investigation into the security breach in Mesa County that despite the breathless insistence of conspiracy theorists including alleged “QAnon” progenitor Ron Watkins, no evidence of anything justifying the wild initial claims about the data stolen from the Mesa County Clerk’s office was forthcoming. County clerks and election system experts alike attest that the affected machines are not connected to the internet, and the software can’t be tampered with remotely in any way. There’s no evidence that has emerged from this breach of any external vulnerability to Dominion’s systems at all–only when trusted individuals turn off cameras and allow tampering in a secure space.

The real risk, as these Bay area experts spell out with admirable clarity we’d love to see more of from local media, is that the exposure of this proprietary data will lead directly to future attempted security breaches. We have every reason to believe Dominion is working right now to address any issues that may arise, but that’s not the point: by leaking this code to the world in the first place, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and her fringy band of zealots who refuse to accept the outcome of the 2020 election have given bad actors a wealth of knowledge to attempt the very thing Peters and her accomplices say they don’t want.

If Peters and her co-conspirators figure this out before sentencing, some contrition before the judge might help. But we don’t have to argue with these “hickerbillies” forever. No matter how sincerely and earnestly their misguided intentions, the public trust has been criminally violated for no justifiable purpose.

Just lock them up already.

Republican Redistricting Lobbyists Investigated by State SOS

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  by: Colorado Pols September 15, 2021 at 1:43 PM MDT

GOP operative Alan Philp

As the redistricting process in Colorado lumbers along toward a theoretical conclusion early next month, we’ve been following in this space the story of some well-known Republican operatives who can’t seem to figure out how to lobby staff and members of Colorado’s two independent redistricting commissions without breaking the law.

Former House Speaker Frank McNulty, former State Sen. Greg Brophy, and longtime Republican consultant Alan Philp have made a number of very obvious mistakes in their ham-handed efforts to tilt the drawing of new legislative and congressional maps toward GOP interests. As Evan Wyloge reports for The Colorado Springs Gazette, there is apparently enough concern with their activities to justify an investigation from the Colorado Secretary of State’s office:

An investigation into whether a secretly funded nonprofit organization has been illegally lobbying the state’s redistricting commissioners will move forward, after the secretary of state reviewed a complaint filed against the group and found enough evidence to warrant a full probe. [Pols emphasis]

The decision to further investigate Colorado Neighborhood Coalition, the 501c4 nonprofit organization run by longtime Republican operatives at the center of the complaint, could have broad implications for the transparency now required around the redistricting process, and comes after several efforts to influence the redistricting commissions without full transparency have emerged…

…The complaint, filed in August by former Democratic lawmaker Stanley Matsunaka, accuses two Colorado Neighborhood Coalition employees — former House Speaker Frank McNulty and former state lawmaker Greg Brophy — of lobbying the commissioners without registering their activity or their clients. Matsunaka also accused a third Colorado Neighborhood Coalition employee, former Colorado Republican Party executive director and now political consultant Alan Philp, of failing to file proper disclosures of his lobbying activity, even though he is registered as the group’s lobbyist.

Philp responded to questions from Wyloge by predictably calling the investigation a “partisan” attack before offering this amusing excuse:

Philp added that he believes he was told in an email by the Secretary of State’s Office, after the complaint was filed, that his disclosures were sufficient.

You have an email from the Secretary of State’s office, eh? Is there a reason you didn’t bother to save a copy of this email? This might have been a good thing to keep in your files if such a thing actually existed.

In related news, The Colorado Times Recorder posted the full video of a redistricting lobbyist training conducted in July by Republican State Rep. Matt Soper. This is the training in which Soper prefaces his comments to people involved in the training by saying, “I never want you to mention that you heard this coming from me.”

The net effect of all these shenanigans from Republicans is to shine a light back on their own partisan interference in the redistricting process, which is something that makes redistricting commissioners and staff very nervous…and absolutely isn’t going to help them in trying to get new maps drawn in their favor.

Has The Fever Of Recallpalooza Finally Broken?

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  by: Colorado Pols September 15, 2021 at 11:24 AM MDT

UPDATE: Here’s how the Recall Polis ringleader was pre-coping with yesterday’s loss Monday afternoon:

We haven’t seen any word since. Perhaps we won’t.

—–

Now-Rep. Lauren Boebert gathering Recall Polis signatures in front of Shooters Grill in Rifle.

The Los Angeles Times’ political unit recaps last night’s failure to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom, rejecting the recall question by a slightly greater margin than Newsom enjoyed in his 2018 election win–an historic victory over far-right activists abusing the recall process meant to resolve serious cases of malfeasance to force electoral do-overs with a “reweighted” electorate. That’s a victory, as we’ll discuss, that will resonate beyond the borders of the Golden State:

The recall offered Republicans their best chance in more than a decade to take the helm of the largest state in the union. But the effort was undercut when Newsom and the nation’s leading Democrats, aided by visits to California by President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, portrayed the campaign to oust the governor as a “life and death” battle against “Trumpism” and far-right anti-vaccine activists…

[Larry] Elder was a perfect foil, [GOP strategist Dave] Gilliard said. The Republican opposed abortion rights and supported offshore oil drilling, anathema to the state’s Democratic majority. Elder has also been a die-hard supporter of Trump, an immensely unpopular figure in California. In fact, Gilliard said, recall proponents pleaded with Trump’s advisors to “convince him to stay out of it,” which was successful until recent days when he started making baseless claims that California’s recall election was “rigged.”

…Newsom is the second California governor to have faced a recall election, which was projected to cost $276 million dollars, a price tag blasted by Democrats. In 2003, California voters upset over rolling power outages, budget cuts and a steep increase in vehicle license fees recalled Democratic Gov. Gray Davis from office and elected actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who remains the last Republican to have served as the state’s chief executive.

“Herbie the Hate Bug.”

The massive expense of the 2021 California recall election is even more outrageous when you consider that Newsom was already up for re-election in 2022. Far from being at a disadvantage after this fight, however, Newsom has a fully operational campaign ready to march triumphantly into next year’s elections. The specter of the 2003 gubernatorial recall election in California, which has been the model for every subsequent recall election organized by conservatives in recent years, has been decisively put to rest.

What does this mean in Colorado–where Republicans in 2019 made a serious, party-sanctioned effort to recall opportune target Democratic lawmakers, followed by two “official” and a whole slew of fundraising operations masquerading as recall campaigns against Gov. Jared Polis? After 2019’s incoming Colorado Republican party chair Ken Buck promised to teach Democrats how to spell “R-E-C-A-L-L” and his vice-chair now successor Kristi Burton Brown personally spearheaded the disastrous recall campaign against Rep. Tom Sullivan of Centennial, in Colorado the GOP recall movement quickly degenerated into small-scale grifting operations whose questionable spending habits and complete lack of progress toward their stated objectives became a major embarrassment to Republicans at all levels.

As of today, we have a pretty good indicator of what Colorado’s recall evangelists and grifters would have done with millions of dollars had they ever been given access to that kind of money. The Recall Polis campaign fleeced small donors for their welfare and pension checks, so in that respect one might feel more sympathy over the smaller amount of money grifted here versus the millions and millions wasted in California trying to recall Gavin Newsom. The scale of the financing would only have magnified the scale of their failure.

And in both places, the idea of trying again, without a justification of the kind recalls were actually created for…

Well folks, that’s the most ridiculous thing we can possibly imagine. How about you?

This is Your Guy? Really?

2
  by: Colorado Pols September 14, 2021 at 1:54 PM MDT

“I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”

     — former President Trump, speaking to Vice President Mike Pence ahead of finalizing the Electoral Vote count

The complete history of the Donald Trump administration has yet to be written, which is good for people who sell books but scary as hell for the rest of us. In fact, we may only know about 30-40% of just how terrible things really were inside Trump’s White House…particularly near the end of his time in the Oval Office.

As CNN reports, a new book from legendary journalist Bob Woodward and Washington Post reporter Robert Costa shows once again how hard many elected officials and public servants had to work to protect America FROM Trump:

Two days after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, President Donald Trump’s top military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, single-handedly took top-secret action to limit Trump from potentially ordering a dangerous military strike or launching nuclear weapons, according to “Peril,” a new book by legendary journalist Bob Woodward and veteran Washington Post reporter Robert Costa.

Woodward and Costa write that Milley, deeply shaken by the assault, ‘was certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.’

Milley worried that Trump could ‘go rogue,’ the authors write.

That guy

The Woodward/Costa book also includes more details about Trump’s efforts to convince Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 election to keep him in the White House:

When Pence did not budge, Trump turned on him.

“No, no, no!” Trump shouted, according to the authors. “You don’t understand, Mike. You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.” [Pols emphasis]

Trump called Pence again the morning of January 6. “If you don’t do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago,” Trump said, according to the authors. “You’re going to wimp out,” he said, his anger visible to others in the office.

Trump has often been described — both during and after his Presidency — as a petulant child prone to temper tantrums when things didn’t go his way. But the quote above puts that analogy in a new light. Trump tried to appeal to Pence by saying, “I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”

This is completely absurd, which is why you know it must be true. Did Trump also tell Pence that he would be uninvited from his birthday party if he failed to overturn the election?

For Republican candidates such as new gubernatorial hopeful Heidi Ganahl, stories like this prompt the same question over and over again: You’ll screw up your own political future just to continue perpetuating the lie that THIS GUY lost the 2020 election?

Death Threats Against Jena Griswold: You Already Know Why

8
  by: Colorado Pols September 14, 2021 at 1:09 PM MDT

Fact-deprived conspiracy theorists and the armed activists who love them continue to insist without evidence that the 2020 elections were stolen from Donald Trump, the fervent belief in which pushing a small but troublingly well-armed and vociferous segment of the population toward what they tell us could be another civil war. The failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th resulted in a temporary realignment of some Republicans away from Trump and the subversive conspiracy theories underpinning continued resistance to Trump’s defeat, but that proved to be only temporary–GOP congressional leadership soon came crawling back as it became clear that the Republican rank and file were unshakably loyal to Trump.

Today, across the country “dead-ender” supporters of Trump are still agitating without evidence that the election was stolen, though attempts to prove that to anyone outside their own self-reinforcing circle of misinformation have fallen apart. But as Denver7’s Sloan Dickey reports, for those already convinced that what they want to believe is true, there’s no need to wait any longer to start making death threats:

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office shared some of those threats with Denver7. The comments were posted to [SoS Jena] Griswold’s personal and public social media accounts and sent in direct messages. The messages make direct and gruesome threats against her life.

“I KNOW WHERE YOU SLEEP, I SEE YOU SLEEPING. BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID. I hope you die,” one message said.

“Everyone knows… there are people looking for you,” another said.

Thousands more posts and threats, many with unrepeatable vulgarity, have filled her online accounts over the past year. She says the threats come as she works to increase access to voting and election security in Colorado.

In Mesa County, where Republican elected officials have been threatened with civil war over public health measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently pilloried for purchasing new election equipment from the same Dominion Voting Systems at the center of the most prevalent conspiracy theories about 2020, the rhetoric hasn’t gotten as personal. Given the vitriol fellow Republicans in Mesa County have contended with for months from their own putative base, it’s not hard to understand how Colorado’s Democratic Secretary of State would be targeted with much, much worse.

While in the end you can’t call these grotesque threats against Secretary of State Griswold a surprise, it’s our sincere hope that they’re dealt with as rigorously as the law allows. With the scandal over Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters’ allegedly criminal actions trying and failing to prove the “Big Lie” dominating the headlines, we feel there’s a need for the public to understand what’s happening to Secretary of State Griswold as a byproduct of the same pressure.

There’s no excuse for any of it, and Republicans have the primary obligation to stand up against it.

Ganahl Faceplants on First Serious Questions

20
  by: Colorado Pols September 14, 2021 at 10:36 AM MDT

UPDATE: Via “The Unaffiliated” newsletter from The Colorado Sun:

“I’ll try and win no matter what the path forward is,” she said. “Whatever my party decides is the path forward.”

Ganahl has a difficult path ahead of her. “We’ve got a long road ahead,” she said Tuesday, acknowledging her challenges.

Well, we’re certainly inspired.

—–
Newly-announced Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl met the media for the first time as a candidate this morning. It did not go particularly well.

Ganahl was primed and ready to talk about her own life story and to barf out platitudes about “freedom” and “the Colorado spirit” and all the other specious crap that newly-minted statewide Republican candidates recite like mantras.

But when it was time to answer some real questions, Ganahl took a header into the floor:

D’oh!

Look, we get that answering a question about the legitimacy of 2020 election is a delicate task for a Republican candidate in 2022. However…if you aren’t prepared to answer this question, then you shouldn’t be running for statewide office. Period.

In a normal world, this simple question would be met with a straightforward answer: “Yes, the 2020 election was legitimate.” Ganahl either doesn’t believe this to be true or is too afraid to reveal to her Republican base that she is not an election fraud truther.

As Chris Cillizza explains for CNN, supporting “The Big Lie” is now part of the Republican DNA:

There’s an interesting nugget buried in the new CNN national poll that shows just how much election denialism has fused with what most people think it means to be a Republican.

Almost 6 in 10 (59%) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that “believing that Donald Trump won the 2020 election” was very or somewhat important to what being a Republican meant to them…[Pols emphasis]

…The idea, then, that the election was stolen is a wild conspiracy theory. But it’s also a wild conspiracy theory that Trump very much continues to push. And that much of the base of the party continues to believe because, well, Trump told them to believe it.

What the poll makes clear, then, is that for a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, believing the Big Lie is an important part of calling oneself a “Republican.”

(For more on this idea, check out Greg Sargent’s take last week for The Washington Post.)

Heidi Ganahl and Mesa County Clerk and Recorder (and fugitive) Tina Peters

Ganahl faces a similar problem when it comes to commenting on efforts by the GOP base to remove itself from Colorado’s open primary system. The right-wing base in Colorado wants to have the ability to choose its nominee for a General Election without having to worry about the input of, well, anyone else. Moderate Republicans recognize this potential problem for what it is, but the GOP Central Committee will still try to make it official on Saturday, Sept. 18. Ganahl doesn’t want to take a position on this subject because she could risk alienating the very people who might end up deciding who gets the GOP nomination for Governor in 2022 — a group that could decide that former 2018 candidate Greg Lopez is the more acceptable candidate to challenge Democratic incumbent Jared Polis in 2022.

Here’s more from Alex Burness of The Denver Post on Ganahl’s kickoff this morning:

On Saturday, state party officials will vote on a controversial proposal to end open primaries on the GOP side, which would exclude millions of voters from the process of selecting its nominees for major offices. Ganahl declined to take a side in that debate, and also declined to say whether she believed the 2020 presidential election was conducted legitimately. [Pols emphasis]

“I’m not going to get into that right now,” she said. Many state lawmakers say election integrity is a problem, and a smaller faction question whether the election was outright stolen.

Ganahl’s refusal to answer these two questions is a serious red flag about who she is as a candidate. It should also scare the crap out of Republicans hoping to make a serious run at Polis next year. Any dope could have predicted that these questions would be first out of the media chute; it’s inexcusable that Ganahl didn’t have a prepared answer for either one of them. Inexcusable, perhaps, but not surprising giving how bad Ganahl bungled the simple process of just announcing her candidacy.

Statewide Republican candidates have been crushed in Colorado in the last two election cycles, losing to Democrats by an average of 10 points. Somehow, Heidi Ganahl managed to find a way to limbo underneath what was already a very low bar.

Heidi Ganahl Recycles 2020 Loser Cory Gardner’s Ad Venue

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  by: Colorado Pols September 14, 2021 at 9:28 AM MDT

Republican CU Regent Heidi Ganahl launched the campaign she herself has described as a “moonshot” bid to unseat the popular incumbent Democratic Gov. Jared Polis today, and while there’s more analysis coming on the particulars of that launch, sharp-eyed observers took note last night that the location chosen for Ganahl’s kickoff announcement early this morning in Monument, about an hour south of where most reporters covering the gubernatorial race live, is a place we’ve seen before. That is, quite recently:

 

It’s not deja vu: Ganahl launched her campaign this morning from the same Rosie’s Diner prominently featured in a Cory Gardner for Senate ad from almost exactly one year ago. This particular ad saw heavy airplay across the state last summer and fall, being glowingly positive and focused on Gardner’s come-lately support for big servings of federal stimulus cash–the “Santa Cory” approach Gardner tried and failed on the way to defeat in last November’s elections.

By now you’re rightly asking yourself: why would anybody do this on purpose? We suppose recycling venues like this might be a decent idea had Gardner actually won his election last year. As it is, we’re half expecting Ganahl’s first ad to portray her washing John Hickenlooper’s Maserati.

It’s just weird, folks. And it starts conversations that don’t help Heidi Ganahl.

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